I hear you are to go home for Christmas and that all of your family will be together at the Shoals. I wish I could be with you, but I must be here, of course, and I suppose that if I were to be with you, I should be longing to be at Mallowbanks. That isn’t because I am discontented, but only that there are so many beautiful places in the world where I would like to be, that I find it difficult to choose.
I often think what a lucky thing it is that a person is born in a certain spot and is under the impression that she has to stay there. If we were allowed to flutter around over the earth before we were born, trying to decide whom we would have for parents and where we would live, what a state of indecision we should be in!
But here I am, with my own grandmother, in the home of my ancestors, making Christmas presents, and having—Oh, astonishing fact!—all the money I want to spend on them. But I’m not buying things. I mean I’m not buying already-done things to any great extent. I am making them. I want my loved ones to realize that it is still love that I am sending them, and not just a sign and token of my prosperity.
There are all the Carsons and all the McBirneys and all the Summerses and all the Kitchells and all the Paces and all the Rowantrees, to make things for. Of course I count Keefe in with the Rowantrees, though I’m not sure he would like to have me.
Speaking of Keefe, I wrote him a letter and told him what I thought of him.
“Keefe,” I wrote, “you are haughty. How have I come to fall in your esteem? Why am I suddenly ‘Miss Knox’ instead of Azalea. Do you think I ought to suffer a steady average of trouble, and because I have found my people and my fortune, are you going to make me miserable by turning against me? What harm does it do the world if I am happy?”
He wrote back at once, of course. If he hadn’t, I never should have written to him again. Never.
He said he had no idea he had the power to make me unhappy.
I wrote back and asked him since when had he stopped telling the truth. And I said I could see he was looking around for ways of discontinuing our friendship, and that at first I had been rather stupid and hadn’t seen what he was trying to do. But now I understood, and naturally, I would protest no more.
Then I got a letter from him which—well, which changed everything. He said he had not been sure but that I meant to enter upon a new life altogether, and if I had, he did not mean to stand in the way. He said we had been thrown together by accident and that he had forced his acquaintance upon you and me, and that we had been endlessly kind to him, but he did not mean to take advantage of that kindness, but that if I wished to continue our friendship upon the old basis that it would make all the difference in the world to him; that he had had no heart for work or life since the idea had come to him that he ought to let our friendship go in justice to me.